May, 13 2015, 05:45pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Kate Bernyk, Press Director
Jennifer Miller, US Press Officer
US House Attacks Women's Health and Rights, Passes Unconstitutional Federal Abortion Ban
Measure stalled earlier this year due to loud opposition now includes cruel 48-hour waiting period for rape survivors
WASHINGTON
Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban abortion in the United States after 20 weeks--a cruel and unconstitutional measure with only narrow exceptions for women with life-threatening conditions, rape survivors who have received medical care or counseling for the sexual assault at least 48-hours prior to receiving care, and minors who have reported rape or incest to law enforcement or child protective services.
H.R. 36 was originally slated for a vote in January 2015, but cancelled last minute following loud opposition over the bill's previous language requiring rape and incest survivors to report their abuse.
Today's substituted version now imposes additional hurdles that interfere with the patient-provider relationship and further delay care, including what amounts to a mandatory 48-hour waiting period for rape survivors, requiring adult patients to obtain medical care or counseling from a state-licensed counselor or victims' rights advocate for their assault at least two days prior to receiving abortion services. For minors who have become pregnant after rape or incest, they are still required to report the crime to law enforcement or child protective services.
Said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights:
"The politicians behind this bill clearly learned nothing from the outrage provoked earlier this year by its gross intrusions into women's private lives and decisions.
"As if it weren't enough to severely limit women's options for confronting potentially devastating challenges during their pregnancies, this noxious legislation would also require rape survivors to undergo additional medical care or counseling whether they want it or not.
"This bill is a danger to women's lives and well-being, an affront to their dignity, and a threat to the rights and liberties all Americans hold dear. Congress must reject this callous and unconstitutional bill."
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held--first in Roe v. Wade and again in Planned Parenthood v. Casey--that states cannot ban abortion prior to viability. Last year, the Supreme Court refused to review a decision permanently blocking Arizona's ban on abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy, and courts in Idaho and Georgia have also recently blocked similar pre-viability bans.
H.R. 36 would take critical medical decisions out of the hands of women and their trusted health care providers, as abortion care after 20 weeks may be the best medical option for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, bans on abortion at 20 weeks are as dangerous as they are unconstitutional, coming at a point at which a woman is just receiving the results of critical tests to determine the health of her pregnancy--and potentially the presence of life-threatening complications and severe fetal abnormalities.
The devastating impact of these cruel laws are evident in stories like Whitney's, a woman who has spoken out about her experience needing an abortion after 20 weeks in North Carolina, one of 11 states in the U.S. where the services are currently banned. After receiving a difficult diagnosis, she was forced to travel out of state to get the safe, legal care she needed and had a constitutional right to obtain.
The Women's Health Protection Act, which was reintroduced in the Senate and House earlier this year, would prohibit politicians from imposing harmful measures such as H.R. 36 and other restrictions on reproductive health care providers that apply to no similar medical care, interfere with women's personal decision making, and block access to safe and legal abortion services.
The Center for Reproductive Rights is a global human rights organization of lawyers and advocates who ensure reproductive rights are protected in law as fundamental human rights for the dignity, equality, health, and well-being of every person.
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Erasing 'Any Sign of Life,' Israeli Demolition Teams Razing Entire Villages in Lebanon
"This is a scorched-earth policy, a violation of the Geneva Conventions," said one reporter.
Nov 04, 2024
As the death toll from Israel's 13-month assault on Lebanon passed 3,000, satellite imagery analyses published by multiple media outlets in recent days revealed that nearly a quarter of all buildings in 25 municipalities in the southern part of the Mideastern country have been destroyed or damaged in a ferocious campaign that has left entire villages in ruins.
Satellite photos examined by The Washington Post, Reuters, and the Financial Times showed vast destruction caused by Israeli bombing and controlled demolitions of towns and villages, many of whose residents are among the more than 1.2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.
"There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old," Meiss al-Jabal Mayor Abdulmonem Choukeir toldReuters. "Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes. Who knows what will still be standing at the end?"
Meiss al-Jabal native Fatima Ghoul toldThe Washington Post that "everything has been reduced to rubble" in the town of 8,000 inhabitants. Footage circulating on social media Monday showed large portions of the village, which has been inhabited for many hundreds of years, turned to dust in a simultaneous series of demolition explosions.
According to the Post:
Satellite imagery from Kfar Kila shows freshly turned soil where olive groves once stood, suggesting a clearance operation by Israeli forces. Dozens of crushed buildings line the town's main road. The destruction is most intense near the Israeli border. The village centers in nearby Ayta al-Shab, Mhaibib and Ramyeh have also been decimated, the imagery reveals.
Videos published on social media show a series of controlled explosions in at least 11 villages. In a video published to X on October 22, half a dozen buildings fall in an instant after an explosion, covering the 400-year-old village of Ayta al-Shab in dust clouds and debris. In drone footage published online the next day, an Israeli flag flies over the town—now reduced to a sea of broken trees and collapsed concrete.
In one video verified by the Post, IDF troops cheer the demolition of a mosque in the village of Dharya, with one soldier exalting, "What a moment!" while others break out in religious song.
Religious and culturally important buildings are protected under international law. Scorched-earth tactics and disproportionate attacks are war crimes under international law.
"Even if civilians are not inside, those types of buildings don't lose their protection," former U.S. Department of Defense attorney Sarah Harrison told the Post.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces claimed the IDF was obliterating Lebanese towns and villages because Hezbollah—the political and paramilitary group based in Lebanon—is turning "civilian villages into fortified combat zones." Hezbollah denied the accusation.
Retired Lebanese Armed Forces Gen. Akram Kamal Srawi told the Financial Times that "there are two reasons Israel is using this detonations strategy."
The first reason, he claimed, is that the IDF is clearing the way for a possible deeper invasion of Lebanon.
"The second is that Israel has adopted a scorched earth strategy in order to wage psychological warfare on Hezbollah's base people by televising these detonations and weaken support for the group—which will never work," he added.
Israel began attacking Lebanon at almost the same time it launched its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Hezbollah has fired at least hundreds of rockets and other projectiles at Israel in a sustained yet measured campaign in solidarity with Gaza, where Israel's bombing, invasion, and siege have left more than 155,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened in a war that the International Court of Justice is investigating for possible genocide. At least scores of Israelis have been killed or wounded by Hezbollah's cross-border attacks.
In addition to the at least 3,002 people killed by Israel's onslaught, Lebanon's Health Ministry says that more than 13,000 others have been injured. The ministry does not distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilians. Critics say neither does the IDF.
"We're a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home," Lebanon Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Lubnan Baalbaki told Reuters after viewing satellite images confirming the destruction of his family home.
"If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what's in that house," Baalbaki added. "It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life."
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Add $24 Million Worth of Pro-Trump Tweets to Elon Musk's Campaign Giving Total
"Given the sheer frequency of Elon Musk's posting of disinformation and partisan rhetoric, it is almost inevitable that he will be one of the top spreaders of election-related disinformation in this cycle," one expert said.
Nov 04, 2024
Since richest-man-alive and X-owner Elon Musk endorsed former Donald Trump for president in July, he has emerged as the No. 1. financial backer of Republican candidate's campaign. But his support hasn't only come in outright donations. His tweets in support of the former president, according to a new analysis ,are worth a total of $24 million.
In a report published Monday, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that Musk's political posts between July 13 and October 25 received over twice as many views as U.S. "political campaigning ads" run on X during that time. If any of those advertisers had wanted to reach the same number of people as Musk, they would have had to pay $24 million.
"X has long dropped its pretense to be anything but a loudspeaker for its owner's opinions, personal vendettas, and conspiracies," CCDH wrote on the platform as it shared the report.
Since he endorsed Trump, Musk made a total of 746 posts that mentioned key terms such as "Donald Trump," "Kamala Harris," "voting," or "ballots." These posts were viewed a total of 17.1 billion times compared with 7.7 billion times for all paid political ads.
What's more, at least 87 of Musk's election-themed posts between January 1 and October 23 contained "false or misleading about the presidential election."
These were seen 2 billion times, and none of them was appended by a "community note," a mechanism by which X users can fact-check or provide context to inaccurate posts.
CCDH pointed to two main genres of misleading tweet shared by Musk: those claiming that the Democratic Party was importing immigrant voters and those claiming that U.S. voting systems are not reliable.
For example, on September 18, Musk wrote: "The Dem administrative state is flying millions of future voters directly into swing states. They are being sent to cities and towns throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Given that this is a sure path to permanent one-party rule, it is a very smart strategy."
Musk made more than 66 posts along these lines that were seen nearly 1.3 billion times.
Fact-checkers say these claims are false because it takes years for an immigrant to become a U.S. citizen and to be able to vote, and there would be no guarantee that such a person would vote for the Democrats. Existing laws already penalize noncitizens who vote with either deportation or incarceration.
In an example of the second category of lie, Musk wrote on September 4 that "not requiring ID, combined with mail in voting, makes it completely impossible to prove fraud (obviously)."
Musk has made 19 of these types of posts targeting either mail-in or electronic voting, which were viewed almost 532 million times. However, research has shown that voter fraud related to either mail-in voting or drop boxes is exceedingly rare. A full 36 states mandate that voters show an ID before voting, while 14 others have other ways of confirming identity, such as checking a signature against one on file. In all states, voter fraud is against the law.
"Given the sheer frequency of Elon Musk's posting of disinformation and partisan rhetoric, it is almost inevitable that he will be one of the top spreaders of election-related disinformation in this cycle," CCDH founder Imran Ahmed toldCNN.
"He is using the platform to persuade people that elections are rigged," Ahmed continued, adding "it is such a tragic waste of a phenomenally powerful tool."
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Ignore the Cosplay. Trump's Record Shows He 'Does Not Give a Damn About Working-Class People'
"Donald Trump left workers behind when he was president," said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Nov 04, 2024
The final stretch of the 2024 U.S. presidential race has seen Donald Trump, the billionaire Republican nominee, perform a staged shift at a Pennsylvania McDonald's and dress as a garbage truck driver in a clear effort to appeal to working-class voters who are set to play a decisive role in Tuesday's election.
But a detailed examination of Trump's first four-year term in the White House shows that despite his recent cosplaying, the GOP nominee was no ally of the working class when he was in a position to influence and enact policy.
"When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled," the investigative outlet ProPublicareported over the weekend. "He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance."
Additionally, the outlet noted, Trump "tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers' tips" and succeeded in enacting "a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year"—all of which casts serious doubt on the Republican candidate's pledge to prioritize the economic interests of U.S. workers in a second term.
ProPublica also analyzed Trump's proposed federal budgets from 2018 to 2021 and found that the former president "advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut healthcare, food, and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans."
Meanwhile, Trump worked with his Republican allies in Congress to ram through a massive tax cut for the rich and large corporations—a measure he wants to double down on if he defeats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday.
Trump's 2024 campaign has featured some policy proposals aimed at boosting the working class, such as eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay.
But economists and progressive organizers have argued that the benefits of such policy changes would be marginal compared to broader proposals that Trump has not backed, such as raising the federal minimum wage and eliminating subminimum wages for tipped workers. A recent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis found that Trump's economic plans overall would cut taxes for the richest 5% of U.S. households while raising them for the bottom 95%.
During his McDonald's stunt last month, Trump ignored a question about whether he supports raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for over 15 years. Harris, by contrast, has expressed support for lifting the federal wage floor to at least $15 an hour.
"He does not give a damn about working-class people," United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said of Trump during an appearance on MSNBC alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) late last week. "Donald Trump left workers behind when he was president. He did nothing to stop manufacturing plants leaving this country."
"With the Harris and Biden administration, we have seen a bigger investment in this country and manufacturing than I have ever seen in my lifetime. They walk the walk," Fain added. "Trump is all talk."
In a video message to the country ahead of Election Day, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) similarly criticized Trump as an opponent of union rights and argued Harris is the "clear" choice for those who want to improve the lives of working-class Americans.
"While some of us may have differences of opinion and disagree with Kamala Harris on this or that issue, I hope very much we will not sit out this election. We cannot sit it out," said Sanders. "So let's get involved. Let's do everything we can. Let's come out and vote on Election Day, and let's make sure that Donald Trump is defeated and that Kamala Harris is our next president."
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